Orbital

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Orbital
Orbital.jpeg
Developer(s) AlexAltea & Orbital community
Latest version N/A
Active Yes
Platform(s) Windows
Linux
Architecture(s) x86_64
Emulates PlayStation 4
Website phi.nz/Orbital
Support ($) Patreon
GitHub Sponsor
License MIT
Source code GitHub

Orbital is a free and open-source, virtualization-based PlayStation 4 emulator for Windows and Linux. It can only boot the firmware. Do not expect to play commercial games with it. It is a low-level emulator.

Overview

The lead developer, by Alexandro Sanchez (AKA 'AlexAltea', who is also one of the developers of the RPCS3 and Nucleus projects), started working on the Orbital program the day he launched it publicly on GitHub on October 29, 2017. On 18 March, 2019, AlexAltea revealed on Twitter that Orbital was able to boot into Safe Mode from PS4 5.xx kernels on PC, with graphical output.

According to AlexAltea, Orbital relies on "hardware-accelerated virtualization, not emulation, so it yields near-native performance. If anything, there could be bottlenecks in GPU rendering, e.g. due to UMA, but [he had been] working on ways to reduce overhead there." Orbital uses SPIR-V for hardware-accelerated virtualization - it is a low-level shader language used in the Vulkan graphics API. The program is driving graphical output by fully emulating the AMD GPU via the Vulkan backend and recompiling GCN bytecode to SPIR-V.

External links